Intersection: Madison & Loomis
Rating: 5/5
June 21st, 2011
Manifest Destiny, America grew angsty and cramped and moved west. Through desert and over mountains and through valleys, Americans kept moving until they reached California, land of gold and freedom and…Asian immigrants, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know because I started to pay attention in US History and then spaced off until the bell rang. I can’t help it, I’m a dreamer. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn. I just always feel like there’s a better use of my time. No matter what I’m doing. I’m learning when I could be dreaming, I’m dreaming when I could be learning and I’m writing a food blog when I could be getting a job. Life in the world is full of infinite possibilities and I’m going to think of as many of them as I can. It’s just what I do.
There are many things I did instead of replacing my ATM card. That’s why I’ve been standing at this ATM for about 15 minutes. This is my thing, I stand at the ATM at Walgreens from anywhere between 15 seconds to 15 minutes, when I need walking around money. There’s a scratch in my card’s already-shoddy magnetic strip and if I don’t swipe it just right, it doesn’t get read properly. It’s a barrel of fun. Especially on a day like today. You see, there are times where, if I’m swiping long enough, the machine will actually go out of order. Usually, the next one works, but today, today both of them broke. My negligence to get a new card has actually resulted in this Walgreens going ATMless. My laziness is just that powerful. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, I slink away from the pair of broken ATMs and try to blend in with the crowd waiting for the 77.
It’s hot today, been hot all summer. Humid and hot, my phone says it’s 86 degrees. The city likes to keep it’s buses icy and crisp. Sometimes I’ll just take little vacations where I’ll ride a bus for the air and see where it takes me. Not today, today I know where I’m going, it’s just a ways away.
I hop on the 77 and head west, yes, west, my Manifest Destiny. I don’t take the 77 for long though. I hop off at Belmont and Racine, knowing that there’s a Chase Bank where I can get my money and get a new card. Of course, they have a “Now Hiring” sign in the window, just to remind me of what I could be doing with my day or, really, any day. I get my cash and I order my card from a shiny-haired go-getter named Donnie.
Now, while I’m being responsible and getting my new ATM card, I could’ve been responsible and gone to the post office so that I could be assured that my debit card would make it to my apartment. But I didn’t and I can’t, so I have to have it mailed to my parent’s house and have my parents then ship it to me. So, I have to call my mom. My mom will want to talk. It’s hot out. I need to get on the bus. But I need to call my mom. I don’t want to be one of those people that has a phone conversation on the bus, public transit at all really. But I must. So, I do. I call my mom as I wait for another 77 bus.
My mother and I coordinate Operation Receive Debit Card as I board the 77. Not only am I having a phone conversation on the bus, but I end up having to sit next to the engine so I have to talk loud. Luckily it’s a simple conversation, the basic bullet points are my mom is my mom and I should go to the post office, but not before closing or at noon. My mom’s a better planner than I am. I think it’s because her ear has a direct line to her gut and she knows it. Whenever my mom and plans are involved, there’s always something very concrete about how they come out, no matter the time she has to plan. Back in 2005, U2 was on tour and my mother and I were frothing to see it. There was to be grandeur, spectacle and LED curtains. When that mad woman heard that her own brother had tickets to the tour’s Chicago’s stop at the United Center, she saw nothing at all crazy about pulling me out of school to attend a rock concert on a Wednesday. I was going to get a regular, school education, that was concrete, at the end of the day you can’t measure a school education. This concert was a chance at advancing my cultural education, which you can measure, since people like me wear on theirs on their sleeve. She had maybe a week to find a good deal on a flight, since my mom only gets good deals on flights, hotels too. Thanks to a rogue blog post and frequent flyer miles, we ended up with a window view at the Westin for a cup of coffee, and she only had a week to plan. The trip was amazing, not to mention the concert. It was concrete. She says she’s organized, I say she’s superhuman.
After the phone conversation, I end up at my stop, Belmont, Ashland & Lincoln. It’s a Chicago traffic anomaly that I call a Clusterfuck Intersection. I spend a few moments figuring out which street is Ashland and I then make my way to the stop where I can grab the 9.
It takes a while for the 9 to come. It wouldn’t annoy me, but I hate the architecture on this side of the city. It’s all brick without any of the jagged fun. Up north, the west side is to gentrified for me. I know that it’s people like me gentrifying the neighborhoods, but I didn’t vote for it.
Eventually, the 9 comes and I am able to just sit and stare. I can’t make out the entire conversation of the angry Mexican man, sitting next kitty corner to me on his phone, but it’s rushed, worried, excited. He barks his words like he’s making some kind of stir-fry of emotions. He’s meeting someone, I don’t know why and, from what I can tell, neither does he. He gets off at Fullerton and I am left to wonder the possibilities of his day.
Going south and looking west is an experience. There’s just something about watching the skyline shift from industrial nature of the northwest side to the water towers of the west loop. A poet friend of mine can’t stop singing the praises of the west side and I have no intention of stopping her. The west side should be sung about. It’s like an ocean bed of brick and metal, stained a pale, burnt orange like a photo in a Ken Burns documentary. It’s my redwood forest, where windows and water towers tell stories of a time I’ll never see.
Nothing really special about the ride on the 9, except the architecture, but I know I can’t do it enough justice. It was just me and others and a redheaded couple. I’ve learned redheads stick together.
Eventually, the 9 dumps me in Union Park, by Lake and Ashland. There’s something much wider about the west side. Just walking around I can feel more room to breathe, more room for breeze to give a quick break from the city’s swelter as I swagger down Ashland. Like I said before, I know where I’m going. The Palace Grill, it’s this little greasy spoon I heard about, next to a skating rink called Johnny’s Ice House. I head east on Madison and after one of those long, crosstown blocks, I finally see the tiny diner. I mean tiny, it looks like it’s the size of a large boxcar, black and white awnings and just overall, something about it feels out of place. It looks like some Midwestern suburb’s hidden gem or something. But here it is, on the sepia-toned west side.
Inside the building is like some kind of forgotten chain restaurant, but different, I can’t put my finger on it because I’m too distracted by the air conditioning, there is no way that it is still 86 degrees outside. If you’ve read before, then you know that I have a thing about greasy spoons and their waitresses. I like them to treat me like dirt. It’s what greasy spoon waitresses do to outsiders. But I also acknowledge, and equally enjoy, the other type of greasy spoon waitress. The kind that could make a bowl of bran flakes give you diabetes. Now, I don’t like overly kind people, or people who treat me like dirt for that matter, but a greasy spoon’s waitress says a lot about the establishment itself. A bad greasy spoon has servers who put on an act. Their bosses want the place to be a greasy spoon and so they force their staff to fit that mold. But there isn’t a mold for greasy spoons. A restaurant has to evolve into a greasy spoon.
So, what does this greasy spoon’s waitress say about the place? She’s young-ish, but there’s something just a little weathered about her. She warmly greets me and then immediately goes back to reading her paper, not out of rudeness, but out of trust that I can find my own seat in this small, empty diner. I take a seat at the counter. My waitress looks up again from her paper to get my drink order. As she fills up a plastic cup with ice and coke, I look over at the large griddle that’s behind the counter. A silent cook was placing strip after strip of bacon on the griddle, prepping it for future customers. My waitress delivers my drink and I know what I should order. Looking around, I’ve seen a lot about them having the “Best Breakfast in Chicago”. I always have a way to test this. The same way I tested it at the Ohio Coffee Shop, corned-beef hash, two eggs, white toast and hash browns. It’s my go-to breakfast, simply because everyone does it the same way, essentially. So, it’s not about how the dish turned out, it’ll always turn out edible. It’s about what makes their corned-beef hash and eggs different from everyone else’s. I ask for my eggs cooked over easy, because I am no longer a sniveling nancy boy who only eats scrambled eggs. My waitress hands the ticket to the cook, who leaves a baconless section of the griddle, my baconless section of the griddle.
I look around the Palace Grill for a while, all of the clutter on the walls starts to make sense. When I first walked in, it looked like a desperate attempt to seem like a “Real Chicago Joint”, but soon I notice that most of it is years of praise that they didn’t have room for anywhere else. The medals of a veteran that never asked for any. This place is too sincere to be kitschy, that’s what I couldn’t put my finger on before. Established in 1938, this is clearly a fully evolved greasy spoon. It doesn’t take long for my food to get to me. But me and my waitress both notice that she forgot my hash browns and has the cook throw some on for me, again, that section will go baconless.
There is nothing else to call this food, except absolutely beautiful. The eggs, the hash, my god. I am careful as I go to cut open my first egg. This is important. I want to cut in and watch the yolk leak. If it doesn’t, it won’t matter how pretty this breakfast is.
The egg cuts like a New Orleans levy, flooding the corned-beef hash with yolk. It’s a truly beautiful sight. That man slapping bacon on a griddle knows what he’s doing. The egg is perfectly cooked and the corned-beef hash is either house made or cooked just right, because it coats my mouth in flavor and has that absolutely perfect corned-beef hash texture, so mushy and lumpy but so consistent.
I’m not someone who usually eats breakfast at the proper time of day. Breakfast is usually at some mediocre diner, shoveled in my mouth, hurried bought in twilight, and that’s what it always ends up tasting like, twilight. That time of day where you can see all of the colors, but none are allowed to pop, there isn’t enough light. Twilight breakfasts have all the flavors, but none of them pop, they can’t. But this breakfast is a Technicolor breakfast, a breakfast filled with blinding light, each flavor pops with it’s full spectrum. My hash browns then arrive and continue the trend of making me one very happy camper.
After a while, a large man enters and is allowed to sit and have a glass of water while he reads the paper. That’s all he gets, a glass of water and my waitress seats him as happily and endearingly as she did me, this is a top-notch establishment. The man comes in hooting and hollering about some lawsuit against the city, some lawyer is suing because he lost his $90,000 Mercedes Benz during Thundersnow. I’m glad my parents were never those kinds of lawyers. It’s then that I get a phone call from a friend of mine who’d recently gotten in some legal trouble, in the name of confidentiality, all I’ll say is that he mostly went on about how great lawyers can be. Whether talking about great lawyers or douchey lawyers, I was engrossed in what ever I was talking about, because I was engrossed in the greatness of this meal, Technicolor breakfasts can have that kind of effect on me. I don’t even care that the hash browns were originally forgotten about, it only kept me from filling up on potatoes. There are infinite ways that this meal could’ve turned out and this is exactly the way it should have.
When I can’t eat another bite, I pay a quick $15ish and I leave and it’s really simple. But the heat, my god the heat. I’m full and I’m hot. I start to head west and that’s when I really get my bearings. I see the top of the United Center, just above the tress. I’ve been by it on the train a number of times, but I hadn’t actually been to the area since the concert.
Before I know what I am doing, I start sprinting down Madison. The breeze from running felt nice, like I’d hit Pacific Sea air. I stop in front of the ticket booth and take the building in for a moment. I cross the street and am hit by a chill. The building was emitting cool air, they air condition the outside for all the fans that wait around. There are no fans today. I am the only pedestrian in the area. Parking lots surround the United Center like an ocean of concrete.
If you’ve never experienced outdoor air-conditioning, then you should. It’s truly amazing. Looking around at these empty parking lots, I dance, I sing U2 songs at the top of my lungs. I balance on benches and drum on the walls. I’ve hit California and now I’ve gone out to sea and the ocean is big. There are infinite possibilities to what I could be doing, besides dancing and singing and making a spectacle in front of an empty stadium, but it doesn’t matter. I could be doing anything, but I’m talented and I’m well intentioned, I’ll end up doing something. Especially with this city on my side.
After a rather stunning rendition of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”, I get on the 20, which will take me to the 8, which will take me home. I sit behind a man who starts barking about “Weak ass shit” and other phrases that just make him sound like an extra on The Wire. He’s rambling, twitchy and fascinating, but he soon gets off the bus, with a couple of notebooks and a cheap textbook. Where ever he’s going, he’s going to get shit done.
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